Free Resources

Free-to-use resource links

These resources are free-to-use, but may be subject to specific terms for attribution, adoption, and reuse. Please check for any applicable licenses and requirements for use and attribution.

Additional information on open textbooks is also contained in our Open Textbooks LibGuide.

This list is by no means comprehensive and should you know of a resource that does not appear in our list and you think it should, please contact the Copyright Office and tell us about it!

Click the section titles in the bulleted list to jump to each of the following categories of resources:

• Books
• Educational Materials
• Images
• Journals
• Music
• Search Engines
• Other
  

Books

College Open Textbooks
collegeopentextbooks.org
A collection of twenty-eight educational non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges, is focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks to more than 2000 community and other two-year colleges.

Directory of Open Access Books
doabooks.org
A discovery service for peer reviewed books published under an Open Access license. DOAB provides a searchable index to the information about these books, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher’s website or repository.

Librivox
librivox.org
Librivox states their goal is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the Internet.

Project Gutenberg
gutenberg.org
Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks.

Project Gutenberg Canada
gutenberg.ca
Provides access to free eBooks available in the Public Domain in Canada.

US Library of Congress
loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html
Access to print, pictorial and audio-visual collections and other digital services.

 

Educational Materials

CBC Digital Archives
cbc.ca/archives
A uniquely Canadian audiovisul resource, this free site features thousands of radio and television clips from the archives of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

College Open Textbooks
collegeopentextbooks.org
A collection of twenty-eight educational non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges, is focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks to more than 2000 community and other two-year colleges.

Commonwealth of Learning
col.org
An intergovernmental organisation created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open learning/distance education knowledge, resources and technologies.

Connexions (Rice University)
cnx.org
A self-described dynamic digital educational ecosystem consisting of an educational content repository and a content management system optimized for the delivery of educational content.

Coursera
coursera.org
A social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free.

edX
edx.org
A not-for-profit enterprise of its founding partners Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that features learning designed specifically for interactive study via the web.

Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education
iskme.org
An independent non-profit research institute established in 2002. Dedicated to the study, spread, and strategic use of knowledge management in education, ISKME helps schools, colleges, universities, and the organizations that support them expand their capacity to collect and share information, apply it to well-defined problems, and create open knowledge-driven environments focused on learning and success.

JISC OER
jisc.ac.uk/oer
A registered charity that works on behalf UK higher education to further education and skills to champion the use of digital technologies.

JORUM
jorum.ac.uk
A free online repository that aims to collect and share learning and teaching materials, allowing their reuse and repurposing.

Library and Archives Canada
collectionscanada.gc.ca/index-e.html
Library and Archives Canada preserves and makes accessible the documentary heritage of Canada. Access to resources include publications, archival records, sound and audio-visual materials, photographs, artworks, and electronic documents.

MERLOT
merlot.org/merlot/index.htm
A free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty,
staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy.

MIT OpenCourseware
ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
A web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OpenCourseware is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.

Monterey Institute for Technology and Education
montereyinstitute.org/
An educational non-profit organization committed to improving access to
education. MITE (pronounced "mighty") manages a range of projects from establishing systems for the development and distribution of open educational content to efficacy studies and other educational research.

National Science Digital Library
nsdl.org
Provides high quality online educational resources for teaching and learning, with current emphasis on the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines—both formal and informal, institutional and individual, in local, state, national, and international educational settings.

OER Commons
oercommons.org
OER Commons helps educators, students, and lifelong learners find Open Educational Resources through a single point of access from which they can search, browse, and evaluate resources in our growing collection of over 42,000 high-quality OER.

Open Learning Initiative (Carnegie Mellon University)
oli.cmu.edu
A grant-funded group at Carnegie Mellon University, offering innovative online courses to anyone who wants to learn or teach. They aim to improve learning and transform higher education through the creation of high-quality courses and contribution of original research.

Open Yale Courses
oyc.yale.edu
Provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses at Yale with the goal of expanding access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.

OpenDOAR
opendoar.org
An authoritative directory of academic open access repositories.

Saylor.org
saylor.org
A non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., their goal is free and open education for all.  With over 270 free, self-paced, online courses their current focus is on the undergraduate college level with the goal of producing high course and program completion rates.

Udacity
udacity.com
Offering accessible, affordable, engaging classes online where access is open to all.

Utah State Wide OCW
ocw.usu.edu
A collection of educational material used in formal Utah State campus courses, seeking to provide people around the world with an opportunity to access high quality learning opportunities.

YouTube EDU
youtube.com/education
Brings learners and educators together in a global video classroom by providing access to a broad set of educational videos that range from academic lectures to inspirational speeches.

 

Images

Creative Commons Search
search.creativecommons.org
A single interface allows a search across multiple search platforms and resources. Not all results returned are licenced under Creative Commons licences though. See individual results for more detail.

Flickr: The Commons
flickr.com/commons
A photo sharing site on Flickr where institutes such as The Library Of Congress, Powerhouse Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, and various users can post and share images that have no known copyright restrictions.

Free Photos - Public Domain Site
publicdomainpictures.net
A repository for free public domain images.

Image After
imageafter.com/index.php
Image*After is a large online free photo collection. You can download and use any image or texture for either personal or commercial purposes.

Images Canada
imagescanada.ca/index-e.html
A simple user interface that will search across the collections of participating libraries, archives, museums and universities across Canada for uniquely Canadian images.

Internet Archive
archive.org/index.php
The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.

Library and Archives Canada
collectionscanada.gc.ca/lac-bac/search/images
Library and Archives Canada preserves and makes accessible the documentary heritage of Canada. Access to resources include publications, archival records, sound and audio-visual materials, photographs, artworks, and electronic documents.

MorgueFile
morguefile.com
High resolution digital stock photography. The site offers thousands of free images almost all that have no restrictions or agreements attached. In addition the site requires no login to download the high quality files.

Open Clip Art Library
openclipart.org
A repository of high quality, free for any purpose clipart.

PikWizard
pikwizard.com
Free, high-quality, and attribution-free stock photos.

Pixabay - Public Domain
pixabay.com
A repository for public domain images. You can freely use any image from this
website in digital and printed format, for personal and commercial use, without attribution requirement to the original author.

Public Domain Clip Art
pdclipart.org
A repository of 25,000+ public domain clip art.

Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
An online database of freely usable media files with no restrictions.

 

 

Journals

Directory of Open Access Journals
doaj.org
The DOAJ aims to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals, thereby promoting their increased usage and impact.

Public Library of Science (PLoS)
plos.org
A nonprofit Open Access publisher and advocacy organization with a mission of leading a transformation in scientific and medical research communication.

PubMed Central
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
PubMed comprises more than 22 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.

 

Music

CC Mixter
ccmixter.org
An open and free community music remixing site featuring remixes and samples licensed under Creative Commons licenses.

Musopen
musopen.org
Provides public domain recordings, sheet music, and textbooks to the public for free, without copyright restrictions.

Mutopia Project
mutopiaproject.org
Offering sheet music editions of classical music for free download.

 

Search Engines

DiscoverEd
wiki.creativecommons.org/DiscoverEd
A metadata enhanced search tool for OER.

Jorum
jorum.ac.uk
A free online repository that aims to collect and share learning and teaching materials, allowing their reuse and repurposing.

OER Common
oercommons.org
OER Commons helps educators, students, and lifelong learners find Open Educational Resources through a single point of access from which they can search, browse, and evaluate resources in our growing collection of over 42,000 high-quality OER.

OER Dynamic Search Engine
edtechpost.wikispaces.com/OER+Dynamic+Search+Engine
A wiki page of OER sites with accompanied search engine (powered by Google Custom Search).

Share
https://share.osf.io
Share open source directory search

Temoa
temoa.info
A portal for Open Educational Resources (OER) which aims to support the education community.

 

Other

Open Government
open.gc.ca
Offers Canadian Government data up to citizens, private sector and non-governmental organizations in more useable and useful formats.

Smithsonian Research Online
research.si.edu
Smithsonian Research Online is a set of services to the research community both within and outside the Smithsonian Institution. Managed by the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, the program assists in capturing the research output of Smithsonian scholars and making it available to Institutional management as well as scientists and historians world-wide.

Videvo
videvo.net
Videvo is a database of free stock video footage and motion graphics, many of which are licensed under Creative Commons (BY-3.0).

Vimeo
vimeo.com
Vimeo is a user-generated video sharing website where users can view, upload and share videos.